The Jesus Incident: The Pandora Sequence, Book 1

The last survivors of humanity have just been deposited on Pandora, a horrific, poisonous planet rife with deadly nerve-runners, hooded dashers, airborne jellyfish, and intelligent kelp. The determined colonists attempt to establish a bridgehead on the deadly, inhospitable planet, but more trouble arises. Their sentient ship - backed up by an impressive array of armaments - has decided it is God and is insisting the colonists find appropriate ways to worship it.

The Godmakers

On the edge of a war-weary and devastated galaxy, charismatic Lewis Orne has landed on Hamal. His assignment: To detect any signs of latent aggression in this planet's population. To his astonishment, he finds that his own latent extrasensory powers have suddenly blossomed, and he is invited to join the company of "gods" on this planet - and the people here place certain expectations on their gods.

The Number of the Beast

The wickedest, most wonderful science fiction story ever created in our - or any - time. Anything can begin at a party in California - and everything does in this bold masterwork by a grand master of science fiction. When four supremely sensual and unspeakably cerebral humans - two male, two female - find themselves under attack from aliens who want their awesome quantum breakthrough, they take to the skies - and zoom into the cosmos on a rocket roller-coaster ride of adventure, danger, ecstasy, and peril.

Man of Two Worlds

What if the entire universe were the creation of alien minds? After an unfortunate spaceship accident, the hedonistic human Lutt Hansen, Jr., finds himself sharing his body and mind with a naïve alien dreamer. Together the two must survive dangers, schemes, and assassination attempts - but can they survive each other?

We Are Legion (We Are Bob): Bobiverse, Book 1

Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it's a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street. Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets.

Artifact

Deep in the Indian Ocean, Dr. Selene Khan enters an underwater dome thousands of years old, one that is fully operational. She barely escapes to the surface, only to discover that her research vessel has vanished. Can she make it to shore 100 miles away? On the other side of the world, Agent Jack Elliot uncovers an impossible 900 grams of antimatter. The trail leads him to Egypt, betrayal, and a sinister brainwashing facility. There, in a desperate move, he rescues Dr. Selene Khan.

To Sail Beyond the Sunset: The Life and Loves of Maureen Johnson (Being the Memoirs of a Somewhat Irregular Lady)

Maureen Johnson, the somewhat irregular mother of Lazarus Long, wakes up in bed with a man and a cat. The cat is Pixel, well-known to fans of the New York Times best seller The Cat Who Walks through Walls. The man is a stranger to her, and besides that, he is dead.

Starfire

On June 30, 1908, an object fell from the sky, releasing more energy than a thousand Hiroshima bombs. A Siberian forest was flattened, but the strike left no significant crater. The anomaly came to be known as the Tunguska Event, and scientists have never agreed whether it was the largest meteor strike in recorded history - or something else. Alien artifacts have been uncovered since the 1908 event, and a new star drive is discovered.

The Dosadi Experiment

Generations of a tormented human-alien people, caged on a toxic planet, conditioned by constant hunger and war - this is the Dosadi Experiment, and it has succeeded too well. For the Dosadi have bred for vengeance as well as cunning, and they have learned how to pass through the shimmering God Wall to exact their dreadful revenge on the Universe that created them....

Hunters of Dune

At the end of Frank Herbert's final novel, Chapterhouse: Dune, a ship carrying a crew of refugees escapes into the uncharted galaxy, fleeing from a terrifying, mysterious Enemy. Hunters of Dune is the exotic odyssey of the crew as it is forced to elude the diabolical traps set by the ferocious, unknown Enemy.

Whipping Star

In the far future, humankind has made contact with numerous other species - and has helped to form the ConSentiency to govern between the species. After suffering under a tyrannous pure democracy that had the power to create laws so fast that no thought could be given to the effects, the sentients of the galaxy found a need for the Bureau of Sabotage (BuSab) to slow the wheels of government, thereby preventing it from legislating recklessly.

Cyteen

The saga of two young friends trapped in an endless nightmare of suspicion and surveillance, of cyber-programmed servants and a ruling class with century-long lives – and the enigmatic woman who dominates them all.

Double Star

One minute, down-and-out actor Lorenzo Smythe is, as usual, in a bar, drinking away his troubles while watching his career circle the drain. Then a space pilot buys him a drink, and the next thing Smythe knows, he's shanghaied to Mars. Smythe suddenly finds himself agreeing to the most difficult role of his career: impersonating an important politician who has been kidnapped. Peace with the Martians is at stake, and failure to pull off the act could result in interplanetary war.

Arrival

The Eden Project was a dream. To start the first extra-solar colony.... To avoid the mistakes of our past.... To start anew. Three generations, born and raised on a starship hurtling through space. To never know an open sky.... To never feel the wind on their face…. To never witness the sun rise or set. It is up to the advance team to set foot on each of these worlds, conduct their surveys, and send their findings back to the colony ship. Everything must go as planned, for the welfare of all the colonists depends on them.

Dune

Here is the novel that will be forever considered a triumph of the imagination. Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, who would become the mysterious man known as Maud'dib. He would avenge the traitorous plot against his noble family and would bring to fruition humankind's most ancient and unattainable dream.

The Heaven Makers

Immortal aliens have observed Earth forcenturies, making full sensory movies of wars, natural disasters, and horrifichuman activities - all to relieve their endless boredom. When they finally becomejaded by ordinary, run-of-the-mill tragedies, they find ways to create theirown disasters, just to amuse themselves.

An Old Hippie Chick says:"Read this a long time ago and just came across it."

Paul of Dune

The Muad'Dib's jihad is in full swing. His warrior legions march from victory to victory. But beneath the joy of victory there are dangerous undercurrents. Paul, like nearly every great conqueror, has enemies - those who would betray him to steal the awesome power he commands. Paul himself begins to have doubts: Is the jihad getting out of his control? Has he created anarchy? Has he been betrayed by those he loves and trusts the most? And most of all, he wonders: Am I going mad?

The Collapsing Empire: The Interdependency, Book 1

Our universe is ruled by physics, and faster-than-light travel is not possible - until the discovery of The Flow, an extradimensional field we can access at certain points in space-time that transports us to other worlds, around other stars. Humanity flows away from Earth, into space, and in time forgets our home world and creates a new empire, the Interdependency, whose ethos requires that no one human outpost can survive without the others. It's a hedge against interstellar war - and a system of control for the rulers of the empire.

Dune: The Butlerian Jihad

Frank Herbert's Dune is one of the grandest epics in the annals of imaginative literature. Now Herbert's son, Brian, working with Kevin J. Anderson and using Frank Herbert's own notes, reveals a pivotal epoch in the history of the Dune universe: the Butlerian Jihad, the war that was fought ten thousand years before the events of Dune - the war in which humans wrested their freedom from "thinking machines."

The Gods of H. P. Lovecraft

The Gods of H.P. Lovecraft: a brand new anthology that collects the 12 principal deities of the Lovecraftian Mythos and sets them loose. Featuring the biggest names in horror and dark fantasy, including many New York Times best sellers; full of original fiction; and individual commentary on each of the deities by Donald Tyson.

Soul Catcher

Katsuk, a militant Native American student, has kidnapped 13-year-old David Marshall - the son of the US undersecretary of state. He and his young hostage flee into the deepest wilds of the Pacific Northwest, where they must work together to survive as teams of hunters try to track them. Even as he struggles to escape, David begins to feel a certain amount of respect for his captor. What the boy does not know, however, is that he has been chosen as an innocent from the white world for an ancient sacrifice of vengeance. And Katsuk may be divinely inspired - or simply insane.

Starman Jones

Max Jones, a practical, hard-working young man, found his escape in his beloved astronomy books. When reality comes crashing in and his troubled home life forces him out on the road, Max finds himself adrift in a downtrodden land - until an unexpected, ultimate adventure carries him away as a stowaway aboard an intergalactic spaceship.

Dune: House Atreides: House Trilogy, Book 1

Capturing all the complexity and grand themes of the original, this prequel to the Dune series weaves a new tapestry of betrayal, passion, and destiny into a saga that expands the tale written by Frank Herbert more than 30 years ago.

The Gods Themselves

Only a few know the terrifying truth - an outcast Earth scientist, a rebellious alien inhabitant of a dying planet, a lunar-born human intuitionist who senses the imminent annihilation of the Sun... They know the truth - but who will listen? They have foreseen the cost of abundant energy - but who will believe?These few beings, human and alien, hold the key to the Earth's survival.

Publisher's Summary

The starship Earthling, filled with thousands of hibernating colonists en route to a new world at Tau Ceti, is stranded beyond the solar system when the ship's three organic mental cores - disembodied human brains that control the vessel's functions - go insane. The emergency skeleton crew sees only one chance for survival: build an artificial consciousness in the Earthling's primary computer that can guide them to their destination - and hope it doesn't destroy the human race.

The author explores the nature of consciousness, intelligence, and the consequences of creating an artificial intelligence that is self-aware.

Destination Void's a fairly difficult read and an even tougher "listen." Herbert's writing is dense with techno-babble and conceptual exposition. I had to, at many points, go back several paragraphs and re-read. Listening to the audiobook demanded extreme attention - and even then it was difficult to 'follow' the story in anything but a superficial way.

I cannot recommend the audiobook despite Scott Brick's excellent narration. This is a book that must be read to be understood. If then ...

I first heard of this book in a Modern Scholar audiobook on Science Fiction (also available on Audible). I later came across a paperback copy of this book for a long time, but flipping through it I could tell this would be a book I would have a hard time wading through. The audiobook version proved me right!

On the one hand, this book has intriguing concepts about artificial intelligence and the dangers in creating it. The characters are basically forced into a situation in which they have to create a functional AI under duress. The ways they are manipulated, and their efforts to produce a mechanical analog to the human brain using their ship did create many neat and thought-provoking moments.

On the other hand, the book is filled with technical details that went right over my head. Herbert seems to have done quite a bit of work to make this a piece of Hard SF, but the problem is that the kinds of machinery he bases his work on (huge computers with magnetic tape readers, tons of plugs and relays, and a fraction of the computing power of my laptop) make the book quite dated. I'm not a luddite, but I wonder if someone more steeped in the technology of the time would have an easier time following the logic of the character's building process.

Also, the characters at times seem more less like round characters and more like vehicles to have a discussion about AI. Much of the book is spent with them chucking scientific revelations at one another followed by philosophical introspection. It felt too contrived.

Scott Brick's superb narration made this audiobook readable (or listen-able, I guess). It's a difficult text to begin with, but his efforts brought out the drama and its nuances. If he wasn't the narrator on this one I am uncertain as to whether or not I would have downloaded it.

I knew this would be a difficult book going in, and since I plan on listening to the next book in the series, The Jesus Incident (which from the reviews I have read is much more readable for a contemporary audience), I am glad I picked up this one.

I would recommend this book to die-hard Herbert fans looking to branch out from Dune and Hard SF geeks interested in how AI was discussed before the digital revolution. Casual science fiction listeners will be put off by all of the technical discussions of dated technology.

The premis was good. A ship manned by clones is sent out into space supposedly to colonize a new planet. However, the true purpose is to create a sentient computer using the hibernating colonists as part of the conciousness. It is an interesting concept and the arguments and theories seemed very realistic. My mind wandered during said arguments and there was little action in between to bring me back to the story.

The performer reminded me of Kelsey Grammer doing Sideshow Bob. it became tedious after a while. pop

First published 1966 says it all for me. I wish that had been in the write-up. Magnetic this, pneumatic that is not sci-fi to me in 2017. Painful dialogue. For the historic sci-fi fans. Maybe it was deep and meaningful as some have said, but I couldn’t stand listening for long enough to find out.

The book was difficult to follow due to constant change of characters. Usually I have no problems to listen an audiobook, having it in the background. But with this one, I forced myself into listening. The concept is really interesting and the philosophical ideas are worth exploring but I'd rather read a physical copy of Destination: Void.

If you are looking for something like Dune, I would suggest book 2 (the Jesus Incident) onward. Destination: Void is very much a hard sci-fi novel exploring specific theories of consciousness, philosophical themes, and their connection to engineering - all of which is expounded upon in great detail and (sometimes a bit tedious) minutia. Hard sci-fi isn't for everyone, but if you are a fan this might well hit the spot. <br/><br/>If you love Herbert for character work, scope, and pacing (of the kind seen in Dune), you might want to dig out the short story DV was expanded from, skip this book, and jump right to Book 2 - which has more of an action/adventure sci-fi feel. But if you want a truly challenging and fascinating book that will stick with you and cause you to think deeply, albeit a bit dryly, then Destination: Void is a great choice.

Which scene was your favorite?

The last few pages of this book are really worth the ride. That last line.... WOW!